Rough Silk

Ribbons, ribbons, ribbons; my hair, your fingers, my face. Laced between our outspread arms, silken cords of what-nows and I-wonder-ifs stretch taut through cellophane silence that freezes our limbs and stifles our words. Eye-to-eye and breath-to-breath, our lungs are paralyzed in empty anticipation of speech; we are waiting waiting waiting on the verge of confession, petrified of refusal but hanging heavy and unsteady on fraying bands of wanting. Your eyes twitch with unspoken questions as I stand-- colder than I ever meant, than I ever wanted to be-- with a face that leaves no room for queries, but a gaze that begs answers. Plaiting strands of barbed wire and organza across your shoulders, I weave patternless purposeless tangles in a fool's attempt at intimacy, wanting only to find clarity and comfort in the opacity of crumpled ties, in burgundy ribbons across your spine.

Bare

I haunt the sharpest place in the world, where the trees ring with astounding clarity before my eyes, but slip, shivering, out of focus at the edges of my view; they slide into a vast, unknowable darkness of rustling wings and shifting shadows. The curling smoke spiraling tantalizingly upward carries abjection, remorse, anxiety to the sky, leaving behind only being. Let the fire burn, oxidize your raiment, expose yourself-- let it go. Forget to remember. Strip down to your bones; stand calcified in the omnipresent, omnipotent blackness, close your eyes. One, two, three hundred heartbeats pass before you regain sight, eyes open to the ever-watching, ever-patient trunks. Hopelessly dwarfed, your eyes turn upward to the great velvet bowl of the sky, as it sinks slowly downward to envelop you... swim amongst the stars, love, and condense, brighten; let yourself burn.

I'll watch from down below, ossified in my ring of stones, roots pushing ever farther, holding fast-- the waxen fingers on my weary boughs reaching, reaching as you shine ever-distant: cosmic and unreachable.

When there's nothing left to burn, come back for me-- inflame me, engulf me in your silvery conflagration. Constellations, we'll fly.

This is old

She stalks ever nearer, raindrop footsteps on the soaking grass, shadowdancing, cloyingly coy, unreachable but never quite unsensible. Her taunting tainting eyelids, dark with laughing, shining with flirtatious sidestepping, hide nothing; I don't need to see your eyes to know I'm being played with. Roadmap toes caressing the mud, she waits to run. I tie on my blindfold and give chase.

Endolymph

The walls are breathing as I lie tilted and tumbling slowly in the cotton darkness. I can feel your arms around me like ghosts, cold with waiting. Lids close down and the universe shifts twenty seven point four degrees left and sixteen degrees back right as I jerk ahead and stumble over a crack in the floor that your dripping faucet forgot to mention as I crept across the cramped and crumbling tiles in search of a patch of air to place my potted plant, somewhere where the walls don't steal all of the air to sigh it out, chilled and empty, against my blind and blinking wrists-- pale, taut and trembling, always waiting. I focus my retinae to needlepoints to create a tiny one-moment, one-centimeter void, a lack of sensation, a relief on all fronts; potassium gates locked, pumps off. Sighing out to acidosis, concentration dropping, fingers twitching, pulse racing and nerves crackling. My bones release sounds and stiffness into the soft shoegazed abyss, but they leave energy with no will, windows with no shades to cover the unfortunate exhibition.

Three

exorbitant speed
pulls me apart, rips my seams
blurs all my edges

--

mesmerizing dust
coats our hands and our faces
we turn to the sky.

--

you walk down alone
trailing a shadow of thought
into a streetlamp.

Attraction

if you wanted this
you should have picked me up before I melted into the sidewalk
it pulled me in
as I swirled my fingers through the cracks
they pulled me under
my nerves tangling with the roots of the weeds
I reached in
the clay soft, quiet, choking
I sank down
floating gently in the silent world of tiny worms
suspended
dark behemoths rising beneath me
I fell towards the sky
as the cracks widened with every step
you pulled
viscous resistance, apathetic limpness
pulled me out
the sun was blinding, but you were there
holding me
closer than ever, after it burned
I pushed you away
cold and dripping, caked in concrete
don't want this
let me sink back into the sidewalk
I'll hear you
the echo of your boots on the grey cement
reverberates
I'll know when you're near me
but please, just let me go

These are old

oh, sweet apathy!
why hast thou abandoned me?
it's too much, too much.

--

exhaustion's stolen
everything you thought you had...
my body, my mind.

--

you're delusional,
don't think it's all behind us....
open your damn eyes.

--

you are my caffeine
I am giddy, ecstatic
and crash-- empty, low.

Spin

Floating in an effervescent sea of thistledown
Rocked by your infectious, fevered pulse
Washed by waves of black ribbon
That extract all thought
All emotion
All sense of being
Leaving only a body
In an ecstasy of pain
Reaching, reaching, reaching
Never quite enough.
Jumping, always waiting
For you to catch me in your brittle arms.
You never will, will you?
Not until I've already splintered on the smoking ground.
Twist me out from your spindled tongue
Or send me shooting up your spidered veins
Make me a part of something beautiful
Anything that isn't me.

I am addicted to haiku

When the glass shatters
don't you worry, love, it will
all have been my fault.

--

I want to get lost
In lonesome woods, burning leaves
please don't follow me.

--

remember my feet.
I will forget, but they've got
so many stories.

--

eloquently, I
have nothing at all to say,
yet I just can't stop.

--

I swear to you I
wanted to, I wanted to...
I just never knew.

--

stars get stuck sometimes,
hang above us, and we wait,
evaporating.

More Haiku

your skin is honey,
but I'm not a bee, no, I'm
just a tiny moth.

--

leave me alone, please.
this dirigible only
holds one psychopath.

--

my nose just floated
off of my face, I'm afraid.
can you spare some bread?

--

your shed has been the
base for all my secret plans.
(ignore the bloodstains).

--

wow, that is a large
basket of hummingbirds, sir.
mind if I steal them?

Several Quick Haiku

hello, old man sun.
burn me quickly, won't you now?
I'm a lobster girl!

--

no matter what you
say to me I cannot cry--
I am an island.

--

why'd you take away
that piece of my sky? all the
daisies are screaming.

--

A SUPERNOVA!
That is how I want to die.
Implode, then, flashBANG!

--

oh my god, your hair
the ocean in my fingers
entwining, sleeping.

Failed Attempts

I am an emotional sink, a lightning rod, if you will
I draw in the raving and hysterical and shudder their shrieks down my bones
Twisting my entrails out and jolting my nerves in an electric ecstasy
Too blunt for effective attraction
Intended catharsis still doesn't work
I'm sorry I don't know how to hold you together when you fall apart on me
In the middle of the night when you're besieged on every side
And the persistent thud of the ballista and the sickening rumble of powdered masonry
Makes me drown myself in stale chocolate
Laced with nostalgia
It doesn't really help, but I do like to pretend
That bitterness cancels itself
Rather than building on every regret
Every reminiscence
Do walls hinder or help, here?
Should I render myself defenseless before you
Or would a strong solid facade be better?
As much as I believe in honesty
I don't think omitting how shaky I am
Really counts as lying
Does it?
I just wish I knew how to hold you together
Without lying to you completely...
Trust me, I wish
I wish it could work
It would do us both good, I think
At least for a time
But I just can't risk that
It's too much
Too much
The stakes have risen far too high for this
I don't care if the shrapnel collides with my body
A shield may be all it's good for anyhow
So I'll catch your pieces, love
And put them together as best I can with bits of wire and
Binding twine
Scraps of ribbon
Don't worry, love, no needle.
But my hands are far from deft
I'm sorry
I'm sorry
I'm so very sorry
I wish I knew what to say to you
But everything is mud, now
All my clarity... did I ever have any?
I wish I could remember how I used to handle crumbling minds
Instead of how hypnotizing you smelled...
Why can't I go through and erase all that?
I really don't want to remember you anymore
I was so much more content when I didn't know how lonely I was
But I don't understand
I'm... I guess I'm glad
But I don't understand why...
Hell, I don't understand any of this
That's why I run away and up
Into the wings of the night on fire
Into the spectral current far above your uncaring head
I walk up her fingertips
Crown my head in flames
Because I can't believe you anymore.

Squinting, nearsighted thoughts in the dead hours of the night

Sometimes when I'm talking to people on the phone I forget that they have substance and that they actually exist at a concrete point in space-- they have an environment that they must interact with. I just think of them as disassembled, disembodied voices suspended in a fuzzy black void at the other end of the wire-- which itself is becoming ever more and more imaginary.

You have a way of picking me up so that I am floating in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, laughing and gazing down at the birds like ants below the vaporous clouds, but also of plunging me down to the very depths of the sea so that I lie, swaying gently, in the murky sands, nibbled by unseen creatures and watching the eerie lights of bizarre and grotesque fish drift by before they disappear into the gloom.

On the edge of sleep, my bedsheets are made of barbed wire and eider down.

Spectral moths flash outside my window

The leeching roots swell and crawl beneath my skin
Pale white forms grisly against my tense, anxious body.
They suck the moisture from me
And I become the brittle paper of a wasp's nest.
I fray and curl at the edges.
The tips of the roots burst forth
Grotesque worms greedily seeking daylight.
Shreds of paper drift away from my hollow form
The inside blackened, slick and molding
The outside dry, sun-bleached, and cracking.
I await my end patiently
Turning my withering face to the unforgiving light
Seeing nothing
Only waiting
To resist would be a waste of precious time.

Remaining

I lie motionless in the hard mo(u)rning light.
Threads run out of my ribs
Across the sheets and into the woodwork.
I am dissolving
I am crumbling
I've been torn wide open and I am unraveling.
I stare coldly at the great rend in my body
And I try to reconcile you and me
Who I thought you were
What I've seen, heard, felt
How I feel about us
And about you and me.
I am boneless and I am sinking down into the clay
Its cold, emotionless embrace shields me
From the void growing from the pit of my stomach
As my insides crawl away
Into the bright summer sky.
Yesterday I was a paper bird
Today, I am crumpled and sodden
Waiting to dissolve.

May 30

My brain is dying. It is running out of my ears and my eyes and my fingers and toes. It is leaking out with ever-increasing speed, constantly becoming more and more fluid; it is pouring out of me and it won't come back.
We are too amazing for words, we are too cool for shadows. Fuck this, we don't need faces, what are they but lies we turn to the morning light, begging selfishly for all that there is, on our knees in the cold air, the warm red mud. We supplicate shamelessly for things we should never even hope to hold.
Fight me, fight me, I hate everything you are. I want everything you are. Kick me down into the clay, grind my bones to dirt and ash. You might as well take everything I am-- division is senseless.

April 21

Panorama of a war in the back of my skull
A matrix of burgundy smoke
Grenades, sparks
Crumbling stone palisades.
All sound is muted
As if through thick glass.
Sulfuric lights flash sickeningly.
Pebbles, powdered cement burst
Fall slowly
Outward and down
In lazy, terrifying arcs.
No guns
No soldiers
No sides.
A city in the distance.
No sky, only endless boiling clouds.
No you
I am nothing
I am diffuse throughout what little air remains.
There is only the scorched earth
Strewn with crumbled stone
Lonely stretches of defiant, unmoving, martyred stone walls
Watching their comrades evaporate around them.
Everything is the color of wine.

November 2

Balance on the edge of the seductive abyss
The ecstasy of illusory flight
Freefall.
Rocks and waves and sand and
Black, black agony
Numb.
Aching stone.
Hanging in the air
Looking down
Spinning
Whirling
Dancing
Screaming and laughing and crying and
Loving and hating
Down and up
Into the dark, into the light
Won't hit the rocks 'til tomorrow
It's ok.
Emptiness and black
Ecstasy.
Dragging out
All the way up
Out, out, out
Walked away from sweet temptation
Of simulation
Stimulation
Consideration...
Disturbingly cloying.

October 13

Hope, longing, apathy
Every bit of it's a lie.

Sanity is leaking
Flowing, pouring out
Diffusing all of me
To all of you
All of everything
The world is me and you
And nothing is real but thought
Is aether
And you are so far away.
Float away, it's ok
I'm sorry
Who is this?
One more push
You make me sick.
No, no, not that easily, you won't
Not on your life.

September 16

Day-to-day urges
always suppressed
they compress
they get ugly.

Going to Hell in a lavender hand-basket
Paved with good intentions
But the deeds are by the wayside
With everything I ever meant to tell you.
Goodbye, my mind
Why are you floating over there?
I am minuscule
A giant
I am in your blood, your bones
Bones, bones, bones.
"Three is the number of the day", the blackbird said.
Birds cover the sky
Huge and foreboding
Tiny dove, shot down
Cannon
Fwoosh
Smoke
Flash
Rewind
Replay
Sob, sob, sob
Shiver, shake, hyperventilate.
I'm sorry I collapsed on your sweatshirt
Who are you?
Are you me?
Or her?
Or someone else entirely?
Are you paper?
Flesh?
Aether?
I fall apart
Out of sight
Out of mind
Almost-but-never-quite out of reach.
Who to trust, who to tell?
Who shall keep my secrets well?
Your hair, your hair
It's wet
Soft
Unnatural.
You worry me, I worry you
Don't laugh, just understand.
Why haven't you changed?
Don't you feel the least bit strange?
You, you, you.
So many people, so many words
They'll never know
Oh no, no, no
They stay here
Between my head and the world
Caught safely, never to be let free
Oh no, no, no
Freedom is such an illusion.
I dare you
Wrap your self-important mind around this
Around me.
Go ahead, fuck with my mind some more.
Maybe this time I'll fuck you up, too.
But no
I'm too meek and docile and stupidly virtuous
Damnit, I want to get even
But it's all in my head.
If I'm a balloon, what are you?
Need to forget, forgive, belong.
Don't drift away again
Come closer
Get away from me
I can't stand the distance and the crowd.